The Irish Queen Of Algiers

Book 3

Before the sun had began to rise over the little fishing hamlet on the Southern Irish coast, and the villagers still slept peacefully in their beds, a mixed group of pirates from the Barbary coast of North Africa and soldiers of the Turkish Ottoman Empire quietly rowed towards the shore. Once there, they quietly dragged their boats up onto the sandy beach, drew their swards, and snuck into the village. Before a dog or a cockerel could sound the alarm, the cold-blooded massacre was under way, which within the hour, had left the cobbled streets running red, and the blazing thatched cottages lighting up the night sky. The village was never to recover; the unsuspecting inhabitants were all brutally killed. All, that is, except the one hundred or so that were intentionally spared. A handful of young men, but mostly young women and children were bound, and rowed out to the awaiting ship hidden behind the bay, ready to set sail for Algeria. One of the captives was a fourteen-year-old girl, Catherine Linehan, who, after witnessing the murder of her family, and seeing her home in flames, thought her life was over. But little did she know, it was just about to begin.

Four hundred years later

Natasha and Alex, and their Italian stepsister Gabriella and stepbrother Lorenzo, are accompanying their newly wed parents on their honeymoon to Algeria.While visiting the site of a once grand, but now sad, crumbling Sultan’s palace with her step father Marcello, the renowned archaeologist, Natasha becomes very bored. Hot and tired, and fed-up of waiting for him, she sits down on one of the pieces of alabaster in the dilapidated palace courtyard. While nonchalantly tracing the inlayed curly script on the slab with her finger, Natasha, who knows a few letters of the Arabic alphabet, is intrigued to realize that she can actually put together a few of the letters engraved on it. But she is confused; the letters seem to spell out the name ‘Caterin’, which certainly doesn’t sound Arabic to her. So she checks out the script on the smaller slab next to her. And to her amazement, it seems to spell out ‘Jak’. After the shock of realizing she had been sitting on the gravestones of two dead people, she becomes even more intrigued that they should have ‘western’ sounding names. Why would they be buried in the courtyard of a Great Sultans palace so far from home?

Embarking on an exciting trail of a girl from the 1600’s, when the seas were infested with Barbary pirates and the white slave trade was as rampant as it had been for hundreds of years, Natasha Alex Gabriella and Lorenzo, find themselves following clues that take them from the bustling markets and narrow back streets of Algiers, to the vast open vistas of the Roman ruins of Timgad at the base of the Aura mountains. They begin to uncover an unbelievable story of a fourteen-year old girl, snatched from her home in Ireland and sold into slavery. But the story they unravel of kidnapping, imprisonment with white slave trade, takes an unexpected twist, for as they begin to realize, the blankets of time cover up much more than history.

The Slave Market, by Gustative Boulanger. A beautiful painting showing how anyone, male, female, young, old, dark and fair was kidnapped and taken into slavery. Although this painting of slaves waiting to be sold at market is depicting the Roman period, where slavery was rampant and very much a way of life, it continued for hundreds of years after the Greco-Roman period. It was so accepted and rampant in the 16-1700's that the powerful Turkish Ottoman Empire completely relied on the manpower of the young men they took from coastal villages around N. Europe, the Mediterranean and the British isles for the success of their Empire. The Ottoman Empire simply wouldn't have existed had there not been an endless supply of these strong young slaves to man the oars on their ships of war.
A very small percentage of the girls taken by these Barbary pirates, were from wealthy families, and were held for ransom, and if lucky enough they were returned home. But the vast majority were from poor coastal villages, and were sold and then disappeared behind the walls of large homes and palaces into harems across Turkey, Algeria and Morocco and beyond.